


Maiden of Chaos

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, and the boys who love them, girls with black stars under their skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 00:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14484255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: He was order. She chaos.It was no wonder she wanted to burst apart when he looked at her.





	Maiden of Chaos

The Raft reminded Wanda of Sokovia.

Not the little apartment she shared with her mama and papa before they were killed by Stark’s bombs, or the many alleys and abandoned buildings she’d hidden in with Pietro before their anger grew into a double-edged knife and they went looking for vengeance.

It reminded her of Strucker’s compound.

It reminded her of the claustrophobia, of the gnawing, crawling energy pulsing under her skin when her true power had been unlocked by that damned stone. Of how trapped she had felt under the earth, under millions of pounds of concrete and steel, of how the electric hum of security had wrapped around her like a vice. Keeping her tame. Keeping her caged.

Of the knowledge that she could tear it all down whenever she wanted, if she wanted.

Even in the middle of the ocean, with miles and miles of nothing around her, she fought that impulse to thread herself into the very fabric of the world, and push.

The steady roar of water did nothing to lull her to sleep. A fitting punishment, for a woman who could sew nightmares into the minds of those around her, to be denied more than a few hours rest at a time. The constant stream of low-frequency humming in her ears disrupted her power, making it harder to concentrate, to feel where the universe held itself together—static. It wasn’t enough to stop her, if she decided she was done with playing the prisoner. She’d started to wonder if there was anything that could stop her.

But with the memory of Vision’s warning in her mind, and the screams of those people she had killed on accident (the fire still flickering over her skin as she felt them die, felt them in her own damn mind as if she herself were being wiped off the face of the earth by a girl who thought she could play god), she let herself believe the lie. That she was someone who could be held by steel and force. She let herself go numb with static.

Not like their old television set when the cable had been knocked out in a bad storm, or if her papa had been unable to make enough money to pay the bill that month. She had spent hours running her fingers over the glass surface, giggling as her hair rose on the back of her neck and over her arms, as her teeth prickled with lightning, as her eyelids grew thick and heavy with the shock flickering over her lashes. As she had revelled in the connection. Felt dwarfed by something bigger than her flesh could comprehend.

Held in another cell with her straight jacket binding her twitching fingers tight across her back, Wanda felt nothing but mute humor at how cyclical her life had become. So many cells, all with different facades. Some were nice with soft beds and wide windows. Some were cold. Some hurt. All she should have seen coming.  

A fist pounded against the glass. She jumped, looked up to find one of her guards glaring at her, mouthing something. She frowned, focusing past the hum of her cage, and caught the end of his warning.

“—that grin off your face, witch.”

It took her a moment to feel the strange tilt of her lips, the smile pulling at the edge of her mouth. She had remembered Pietro’s first few days out of Strucker’s control, when he hadn’t been able to stop drumming his fingers on everything. He’d been jumpier than a cricket at dusk, buzzing, jumping, moving so much and so fast that she’d yelled at him more than once for smashing everything not nailed down in their seedy motel rooms.

Wanda blinked, and her smile faded. She stared into the hate-filled eyes of the guard watching her through a foot-thick pane of reinforced glass, watched another guard pull him back with alarm, her eyes darting back and forth, as if she couldn’t bear to let Wanda out of her sight for one moment.

Vision had been right.

She was a monster in their eyes.

Her jaw clenched, and she looked down at the floor. Her own eyes didn’t burn. She was out of tears. The water in her heart had long since turned into ice and sparks and shattered glass.

She couldn’t control their fear. Not while they were awake. Not without delving into the very fabric of their minds and pushing on that which they hid even from themselves. Playing with them. Torturing them. Being exactly what they feared her to be.

But she wanted to. Merciful God forgive her, but she wanted to.

It had to be better than taking it on all herself.

 

~ ✧ ~

 

After the eighth day, she stopped counting.

Meals bled one into the next, her sight rippling at the edges like the white pendants outside the chapel on the hill overlooking a small Sokovian town where she and Pietro had stolen a car on their second day of freedom. She couldn’t even remember its name now.

She had waited for Pietro to meet her with food (she had always been better at hot-wiring cars, she had always known, even before her mind had been warped by infinity, how to unwind and reconnect, how to pull apart the fabric of the world and reassemble it to her will), staring up at that little chapel, feeling the places where its white stucco had begun to peel and chip, the small gilded alcove where Mary had rested in a shelter with her newborn son. Waited, and felt like the world had shifted when she wasn’t looking. Like she had truly grown smaller, and the air had awoken, and all that she thought she’d known had been swallowed in one, ultimate, overwhelming truth—that she was not meant for little chapels and white flags. Not anymore. Shelter was for little girls who got crushed by buildings, not witches who dreamed of the endless chaos of the cosmos. Who walked circles around black holes and pondered the nature of the space between synapses where a person hid their deepest fears.

Who killed, without meaning to. Who shattered the buildings herself, rather than run from them.

It had been easier back then, to see the same truth in Pietro’s eyes. To hold onto him as the universe spiralled around her, knowing that he remembered who she had been before. As if that mattered now.

The low current in her brain made it hard to remember anything but the dull roar of the ocean and the tightness wrapped around her chest. It stripped everything else away, made her into little more than an exposed nerve, prodded and poked to make sure she never forgot who she was, and who she could never again be.

The light in her cell brightened, and she shied away. It was too hot, too searing, the buzz of her straight jacket increasing in pitch until it was all she could do not to scream. Voices whipped past her as hands closed around the back of her neck, hauled her up from the floor. Someone was shouting her name—Clint? Sam?

The rain hit her like a slap, and she stumbled, hitting the metal grate under her feet. It shocked her back to herself for one blessed, lovely moment. Power crackled over her skin, beautiful red energy rose up over her eyes—and then something else dragged her under. Something mundane. Something familiar. A prick in her neck. A drug to dull her senses. Strucker had used something similar when he wanted to test her power in a controlled environment.

It made sense that Ross would do the same.

As if conjured from the fog of her mind, his face appeared before her, grimacing in the grey rain. Behind him roiled storm clouds, and the choppy ocean stretched on into the horizon.

“Congratulations, Maximoff,” he said, his voice grating as she fought to stay awake. “You’ve been upgraded.”

By some strange surge of loathing, she spat in his face, and in the tongue of her mother country, she choked, “Bathe in your own shit, pig.”

Ross stumbled back, cursing as he waved her away.

As she was dragged on wooden legs into a helicopter, she felt herself grin her brother’s best grin, the one that always made their mama shriek in frustration and her papa hide his smile.

 _Careful, Wanda_ , Pietro’s voice whispered to her from across the cosmos, from that little node of matter inside her heart that still belonged to him, and would always belong to him, _or people are going to start thinking you’ve got a sense of humor_.

 

~ ✧ ~

 

Wanda awoke to screaming.

It took her a moment to realize the noise was not coming from her own mind, that she was not reliving the horror of throwing a bomb into a building and watching human ash drift down around her like snow.

No, the people around her were screaming—people in uniforms, wearing the red, white, and blue of American brutality on their arms. The world tilted to the side. Her head slammed against something hard. Pain flared in her mouth, and then blood coated her tongue.

And then, like the first breath of fresh air in weeks, she felt _him_.

The inside of the helicopter went soft with a lovely amber glow. The shadows parted, pulled back like a veil of silk. The shouting dimmed. Time seemed to stand still as Vision drifted up through the metal frame. His eyes spun in concentric blue circles, pupils dilating, as they always did, when they found her. The shuddering wrench of the helicopter went still though the storm outside continued to rage. She felt him directing its path, holding it steady, even as he dodged punches and tasers and people who thought they might be able to stop him.

He only had eyes for her.

Once, she had thought she might love those eyes.

Now, she felt…conflicted.

He glided toward her, snapping the tethers on her straight jacket with a flick of his fingers. She thought she saw something like anger flash behind those whirring irises, but it was gone again just as fast. Like a window shade drawn at the first sign of sunlight. Serenity descended over his expression, and she closed her eyes to it.

“It’s okay,” he murmured, voice low and resonating in the back of her mind, as if the stone in his forehead were able to reach into the heart of her. “I have you.”

His arms came around her as he picked her up effortlessly off the floor of the helicopter. She huddled into him out of instinct, the little girl inside her still seeking that fleeting shelter, and murmured, “These people—”

“Will be fine,” he finished, the sound of metal tearing over her head, the rain pounding on the helicopter’s shell. “They are close to shore. They will make their landing.”

As he whisked her off into the storm, she didn’t correct his assumption that she was worried about their safety. He still thought she was something worth saving. Something these people mistakenly feared.

She would not tell him that she wanted to break their helicopter, rip it into shreds of metal, and damn them all to the ocean’s depths.

Not yet.

 

~ ✧ ~

 

They flew long enough for Wanda to get her bearings. Long enough for her to remind herself that this warm embrace was a lie, and that she was not safe. She was not home. She had no home. Not in Stark’s tower. Not in Vision’s arms. Not since Pietro’s death. And, if she were being honest, not since the bombs had shattered her world when she was only ten.

“Put me down,” she whispered over the cold winds. She realized with a frown that she did not feel the chill. That he must be protecting her from the worst of it, somehow.

“Wanda—”

“ _Now_ , Vision.”

He drifted down at once, the clouds parting to reveal a sprawling city with ambling alleys and old-fashioned buildings made of brick and stone, not metal, and set her on a park bench. The anonymous street was empty, the lights reflecting off puddles in the creasing of its cobbles. She tried to stand, but her legs shook, needles of pain pricking at the bottom of her feet. She was still wearing the American army’s damn prison scrubs.

“You need to rest.”

She looked at Vision, haloed in the street lamp, his face in shadow but for the amber bead in his forehead. It made his eyes look black, and lifeless.

“I need to get something to eat.”

A moment’s pause. “Ah. Of course. I will find you—”

“Nothing. You will find me nothing.” She took a deep breath, adjusting to the silence in her mind. After so long sitting in static, the night felt alarming empty. But her limbs thrummed with energy, and her fingers twitched with chaos. Soon, she would relish this momentary calm. “Where am I?”

“Edinburgh.”

She blinked, startled. “ _Scotland_? You flew me to Scotland?”

“The prison Secretary Ross held you in was located in the Northern Atlantic Ocean.” Another pause, this one more jarring than the last. Something quaked in his voice. Something she hadn’t heard before. “I believe he intended to transport you to a facility in Switzerland. Mr. Stark’s records indicate that there was once a SHIELD base in the mountains there. One where he might—”

Wanda laughed, only to devolve into a cough at once. She felt Vision approach, and held up her hand. Red threads of energy danced over her fingers as she struggled to control herself. “Ross wanted to pick me apart, I bet. Hydra knew more about human genetics than they ever let SHIELD figure out. Probably wants to try and replicate this,” she waved her hand, watching the light dance through the darkness, “for his soldiers.”

When Vision spoke, his voice was soft, almost—frayed at the edges. “It is more likely he intended to neutralize you.”

She waited for the truth to sink in, for her fear to rise up and overtake her.

But it didn’t. Instead she welcomed it like an old friend taking its place at her dusty dinner table—with a reprimand for bad behavior, and acceptance.

“That makes more sense.” She grimaced as she looked up and down the alley, trying to determine how late it was, and where she might be able to steal some clothes.

“Does that not—startle you?”

It was so rare to hear him stumble over his words, always so precise, like a fondly-wound wrist watch whose caretaker never wavered in their maintenance, that she turned back to him. His cape billowed slightly around his legs, his body still and unmoving. No energy misplaced or wasted, no errant twitch of human weakness. He was enduring. Immobile. Fixed.

Born of the same slice of the infinite, and yet so vastly different it was laughable. He was order. She chaos.

It was no wonder she wanted to burst apart when he looked at her.

“Are you asking me if I’m afraid to die, Vision?”

His head didn’t move, but she swore she felt something tug at the back of her mind—the place where she imagined his amber stone had lodged itself into her irrevocably.

“The thought would distress most humans.”

“As _I_ distress most humans, perhaps I’m immune to its effects.” She bit off anything more, her words swarming and tangling up together, making it hard to think. She wanted to thank him, to scream at him, to beg him to take her back to that tower where she had pretended to be normal. Where he had been kind, and attentive, and did not look upon her with fear in his eyes. Where she had wondered if her life had not ended the day she lost the other half of her heart to a flurry of bullets in a war they should not have been fighting.

But if she said anything, she would say everything, and he didn’t deserve that. In his incomprehensible mind, he believed he had been right to stop her, to detain her, to fight against her.

After all, she had struck first. She would always strike first.

“Are the others all right?” she asked instead. “Clint, Sam…the other one?”

“I believe there was a mass break out from the Raft a few hours after you were taken.”

The ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Good.”

He stepped forward in a movement almost—desperate, hands lifting as if to take her in his arms again.

Only to close around the air when she jerked back.

“It does not have to be this way, Wanda,” he murmured, the threads of his voice unraveling even more. “You can return to Stark tower. You can come home. With me.”

The last pricked into her chest, welling up some half-imagined dream she’d once held for herself, a dream of a man borne of metal and magic, a man who resonated in the deep marrow of her bones. A man who understood her. And did not fear her. A man whose heart she had felt even in the moments before his uncanny birth, whose heart she had loved.

But there was no home for her there. There never had been.

“No, Vision,” she said harshly. “I won’t go back. You said yourself that they would never be able to accept me. Why should I inflict myself upon them? Do you think I enjoy seeing their hatred? Seeing them flinch when they see me so much as lift my hands? Do you think I want that?”

He gave her no answer, and his hands dropped slowly to his sides. Still he watched her, the depths of his eyes more black than she had ever seen them. It made no sense. She could feel him, like another sense, like an extension of her own body. She had wondered, once, if he felt her too.

She’d been too much of a coward to ask before, and she was too hurt to ask now.

“Why did you save me?”

Why then. Why now. Would he, again, even after she pushed him away.

His head turned ever so slightly to the side, as if he were listening to something she could not hear. “I…” he hesitated, lips open on an unvoiced thought, “I lost control.”

Anger surged up finally to replace her conflict. “I see.” She took another step away from him. One more. She could keep going. “Perhaps I should remove the distraction for you. So you can go back to Stark with your mind clear. I’m sure he misses you more than I ever will.”

Her thin shoes grew damp at once. Mist soaked through her thin shirt. She wrapped her arms around her chest, held tight, as if to convince herself that she needed no one else’s embrace. That she could live on her own.

“Wanda, wait.”

She stopped without thought and cursed under her breath. _Keep going. One more step._ “Let me go, Vision.”

“I didn’t mean—I don’t want…”

Turning around, she found him where she’d left him, but this time the light washed over his face. Skin glistening slightly with moisture, richly purple under the faint electric bulb, he looked—frightened. Eyes wide and blue and staring at her as if she were the only thing he could see.

She moistened her lips, trying to fight the conflicting urge in her chest to go back to him, to let him help her, to let him keep her safe. To let him try, at least. “What _do_ you want?”

Again, his head tilted, listening to something she could not hear. Could he hear her heavy heart? Could he hear the twitch in her fingers? The urge to touch him? To never stop touching him because he was the only thing her new body of chaos seemed to understand?

“I don’t know.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. Tasted the dried blood on her lips. “I guess that’s one more thing we share, then.”

Wanda tore her eyes from the desperation writ plain in the vibranium lines of his face, and walked into the dark night. Alone, truly alone, for the first time in her life.

And when the fear finally came, she was ready.


End file.
